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Easter word search

Sixteen words for Easter morning: the basket and the egg hunt, jelly beans, marshmallow and chocolate, hot cross buns and carrot cake, a bonnet with ribbons, and the daffodils, hyacinths and tulips of the season.

Words read across, down and diagonally, left to right, in big capitals on a 12 by 12 grid. Once every word is found, the letters left over spell a short line about hope.

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Solving tips

Look for the rare letters first: a Z, Q, J, X or K is easy to spot in big print. Then circle the long words, which cross more of the grid. Every letter belongs to a word or to the hidden saying, so the uncircled letters left at the end are the saying, in order.

In this grid, 4 words read across, 5 words down and 7 words diagonally, and none read backward. The longest is Hot cross buns and the shortest is Bunny, which hides best: look for it last.

About the words

Easter is the Christian festival of the Resurrection. Its date moves each year: in Western churches it falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after March 21, so it can land anywhere from March 22 to April 25.

Basket: In many American homes, children wake on Easter morning to a basket of candy and eggs. The custom is often traced to German settlers in Pennsylvania, whose children made nests for an egg-laying hare.
Bonnet: Wearing new clothes at Easter is an old custom. Irving Berlin’s 1933 song “Easter Parade” made the Easter bonnet famous, along with the stroll down Fifth Avenue in New York.
Bunny: The Easter Bunny came to America with German immigrants in the 1700s, who told of the Osterhase, a hare that laid colored eggs for well-behaved children.
Carrot cake: Carrots were used to sweeten cakes and puddings when sugar was scarce or costly. Carrot cake with cream cheese frosting became popular in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.
Chocolate: Hollow chocolate eggs and rabbits were first made in Europe in the 1800s, once chocolate makers had learned to mold it. France and Germany were early centers.
Daffodil: Daffodils are among the first flowers of spring. In Britain they are sometimes called Lent lilies, because they bloom in the weeks before Easter.
Easter egg: Eggs are an old symbol of new life, and decorating them at Easter is a custom many centuries old. In the Orthodox tradition, eggs are dyed red.
Egg hunt: Hiding eggs for children to find is a custom in many countries. In the United States, the White House has held an Easter Egg Roll on its lawn since 1878.
Hot cross buns: Hot cross buns are sweet, spiced buns with raisins or currants and a cross on top, traditionally eaten on Good Friday in Britain and in countries with British roots.
Hyacinth: Hyacinths grow from bulbs and carry a spike of strongly scented flowers in blue, pink or white. They are often grown in pots to bloom indoors at Easter.
Jelly beans: Jelly beans have a soft center and a hard sugar shell. They became an Easter candy in the United States in the 1930s, probably because they look like small eggs.
Marshmallow: The sweet is named for the marsh mallow plant, whose root sap once went into it. Today’s marshmallows are sugar, corn syrup and gelatin, whipped full of air.
Rabbit: Rabbits and hares have large litters in spring, which made them old symbols of the season’s new life. A hare is larger than a rabbit, with longer ears and legs.
Ribbons: Ribbons tie up baskets and trim bonnets. Pastel colors such as pale yellow, pink, lilac and mint green are the usual choice for the season.
Sunrise: Many churches hold a service at dawn on Easter Sunday. An early one was held by the Moravian community at Herrnhut, in Germany, in 1732.
Tulips: Tulips reached western Europe from the Ottoman Empire in the 1500s. In the Netherlands in the 1630s, prices for rare bulbs soared and then crashed, an episode remembered as tulip mania.

The hidden saying (no peeking until you have found every word): The line comes from Alexander Pope’s poem “An Essay on Man” (1733): “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” People quote it when someone keeps hoping against the odds.

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Easter word search